The human eye can suffer a number of maladies causing mild deterioration to complete loss of vision. While contact lenses and eyeglasses can compensate for some ailments, ophthalmic surgery is required for others. Generally, ophthalmic surgery is classified into posterior segment procedures, such as vitreoretinal surgery, and anterior segment procedures, such as cataract surgery. More recently, combined anterior and posterior segment procedures have been developed.
The surgical instrumentation used for ophthalmic surgery can be specialized for anterior segment procedures or posterior segment procedures or support both. In any case, the surgical instrumentation often requires the use of associated consumables such as surgical cassettes, fluid bags, tubing, hand piece tips and other consumables.
A surgical cassette can provide a variety of functions depending on the procedure and surgical instrumentation. For example, surgical cassettes for cataract surgeries (e.g., phacoemulsification procedures) help manage irrigation and aspiration flows into and out of a surgical site. Surgical cassettes can also provide support for fluid bags, a manifold for directing vacuum/pressure to surgical instrumentation, and other functionality.
Cassettes are generally coupled to the surgical instrumentation at a cassette receiving site. When the cassette is inserted into the cassette receiver, a clamp closes on the cassette to hold the cassette in place. During operation, the surgical cassette can experience a significant amount of force in the clamping area. This force can be the result of the clamps counteracting a force applied by a peristaltic pump pushing near the center of the cassette or other forces.
Often the force in the clamping zone of a cassette is not evenly distributed. This can be the result of differences in dimensional tolerances between the clamp and the cassette or other factors that cause the clamp and cassette to be non-parallel. The uneven distribution of force can cause the clamping zone of the cassette to fail, potentially inflicting catastrophic damage on the cassette itself.
Therefore, a need exists for a surgical cassette that distributes uneven loading to prevent failure.